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CTO Yoshihisa Hashimoto Departs Square Enix

July 25th, 2014 by Tony Garsow

Many Final Fantasy fans will recall the Agni’s Philosophy tech demo using the Luminous Engine from E3 2012, which displayed an impressive look at the potential graphical fidelity of future titles. Today, Square Enix’s CTO (chief technical officer) Yoshihisa Hashimoto has departed the company, citing personal reasons. Hashimoto isn’t the only high level departure associated with Luminous — Julien Merceron, Worldwide Technology Director, left Square Enix for the same role at Konami.

Hashimoto collaborated with the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn team during development to build a custom engine for the reboot, and was working with Luminous for use in upcoming next-generation Square Enix titles such as Final Fantasy XV. While Square Enix has assured us on multiple occasions over the last year that development is still going fine, it appears that work on the engine the game is built on still isn’t complete.

Alternately, this could mean that the work is relatively advanced and a year of release is close to being announced. The time when staff departures can be interpreted two ways, in my experience, are the very beginnings and the later stages of development. But of course, this could be like XII, with the departure causing yet another delay. Pray Etro it isn’t like that.

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